Chameleon Magazine

There are legends, and then there is Sir Chris Bonington. At 91, he’s still the embodiment of grit and grace — Britain’s greatest living mountaineer. The man who has dangled from the sheer faces of Everest, carved routes where none existed, and, at 80 years old, clambered up the Old Man of Hoy as if birthdays were just numbers on a rope. Watching him stride through Cumbria last summer for his 90th, you’d think time had simply forgotten to catch him.

But even the strongest rope frays. Sir Chris has revealed an illness that makes him forget the very hills that defined his life. Imagine that — to have scaled the world’s toughest peaks, only to find the cruelest challenge is remembering the mountains themselves. There’s something almost Shakespearean in that tragedy: the summit conquered, the memory stolen.

And then there’s me. No Himalayan backdrop, no Orkney cliffs. Just the great domestic wilderness of daily life. I put the car key down somewhere — no clue where. I finally get in the car — no idea why. I walk into the kitchen — the summit of Everest — only to realise I’ve forgotten the reason I started the climb.

So maybe Sir Chris and I aren’t so different. He forgets mountains, I forget bread. He once faced avalanches, I face supermarket queues. We both take it one foothold at a time.

Because that’s all memory really is: not the grand sweep, but the small, stubborn act of clinging to one piece of information at a time until, somehow, you’ve reached the top.